Chapter 15 #2
One day Ruth would tell me that her salvaging expeditions weren’t only about being frugal.
She was drawn to things with character, including her husband’s face as he got older.
The daughter of medical missionaries to China, she was raised there, and accustomed to ancient porcelain bowls and edifices.
Her idea of beauty was different from most people’s.
She seated my family in front of the fire, and it was lunchtime for her youngest child, Ned.
His older sisters Gigi and Anne no longer lived at home.
A third sister, Bunny, was in high school, and Franklin was close to Jim’s age.
But it seemed while we were there no one else was.
Later I’d learn that Billy was preaching in Jamaica, and Ruth had just returned home from there.
This was Ned’s and my first meeting, and undoubtedly, I made an unfortunate impression.
To me he was royalty, his dark blond hair shiny in the overhead light, his features fine like his mother’s, his eyes greenish gold.
Thin and tall for his age, he was the prettiest boy I’d ever seen, and it wouldn’t be the last time I thought that.
Seated at the kitchen table eating spaghetti, he glanced at us silently, warily, his mother hovering.
An overhead wrought iron rack hung with blackened pots and copper pans.
I remember sitting on the sofa by the fire as I would often years later.
But in 1966 Ruth didn’t know me, and my family was uninvited.
Worse, my mom was just one more fanatic obsessed with Billy Graham.
She explained that he’d saved her at his Miami crusade, and that’s why we were here.
Ruth had heard such talk before from other unbalanced and boundary-crashing people.
Before she moved her family up the mountain, they’d lived in a rambling gray frame house off Assembly Drive near her parents.
As Billy rocketed to fame, charter buses began parking at the end of the Grahams’ driveway, people boiling out with cameras.
They’d chip off pieces of wood from the gate, picking up rocks, leaves, anything they could for souvenirs.
The oldest child, Gigi, showed what she thought by hurling crab apples and mud balls.
Bunny was an entrepreneur charging for photographs.
While drying her hair in the bedroom one morning Ruth noticed someone peering through her window.
Enough was enough. It was time to sequester her family, and in 1954 she bought their two-hundred-acre ridge for $4,300.
It was much more difficult to navigate if one wished to drop by uninvited.
But that wouldn’t deter everyone, including my mother.
Billy Graham was the reason she’d moved us to Montreat to begin with, her admiration of him boundless, bordering on worshipful.
She found him dynamic, charismatic, and hawklike handsome.
At every opportunity she watched him on TV, listened to him on the radio, read his newspaper columns.
He was a divine messenger, she’d tell me.
Today she might be called a stalker, but she wasn’t in the least. For twenty-some years she would live in Montreat but two miles down the road from the Grahams’ house.
But I don’t think she and Billy ever met.
Not once. On the rare occasion he was home and attended the Montreat church, Mom wouldn’t introduce herself or stare.
She didn’t get him to autograph her church bulletin, try to shake his hand, or ask him to pray for her. She didn’t do as so many, typically people who weren’t Montreat residents. I remember a female college student waylaying him in the church lobby, asking him to sign her Bible.
“I didn’t write it.” He politely declined.
Another student noticed the price tag still attached to Billy’s suit jacket, and asked if she could have it.
He was good-natured as she removed it, practically swooning.
My mother was quietly proud and not the sort to do things like that.
Especially not to Billy Graham. It was more than politeness and respect. She was embarrassed.
Not long after our showing up at his house in 1966, FBI Director J.
Edgar Hoover would advise Billy to own guard dogs and enclose the property with a ten-foot-high fence.
One had to pass through two remote-controlled gates to reach the house.
Possibly, my mother was a contributing factor in this decision.
But if Ruth was upset by our showing up on her doorstep that January day when I was nine, I couldn’t tell.
I recall she was gentle and understanding, asking questions in a voice strong and melodious.
She talked to my brothers and me as if we were neighbors and not intrusions.
Nothing about her demeanor was disparaging or judgmental.
Mom sat close to the fire, staring at the flames as she explained that my father had left us, and that Miami was a terrible, Godless place.
It wasn’t possible to stay there. She rambled about bad people, evil, and the importance of her children being safe.
At some point she handed Ruth a folded note.
I wouldn’t know what it said until fifteen years later while researching Ruth’s biography.
I read her journals and was startled by an entry describing that occasion in 1966.
When I began this memoir, I contacted Kerri and David Bruce at the Billy Graham Montreat office.
They’re in charge of archives, and I asked if they could locate the journal in question.
Ruth’s private papers were kept in her home until her death.
It is hard to know what became of some of the journals I was privileged to read.
We couldn’t locate the one that included the entry she made after my family showed up at her house in 1966.
I can’t vouch for the precise date, but suspect it was January 23 or 30.
What I remember is Ruth wrote about what she’d set into motion to help us. I was stunned to learn what Mom had written in the note she gave to her:
There’s going to be a flood, and I’m sailing away on a ship. Please raise my children in your kingdom.
After Ruth read this in front of the fireplace, she stepped away for a moment to make a phone call.
I didn’t know it then, but she reached out to her father, Dr. L.
Nelson Bell. When she returned to the family room, she leaned over Ned, writing his name with a spaghetti noodle on his plate.
I sensed she was making sure he didn’t feel ill at ease or neglected.
I can’t imagine what was going through her mind, and she had every reason to be distrustful, even threatened.
But as I would learn about her over time, she was fearless.
I watched her take control of an unpredictable and potentially dangerous situation.
As I sat on the sofa, images raced through my mind of Mom with armloads of clothing, the fire raging.
I was trembling inside, feeling chilled to the bone, and Ruth collected wool throws from the backs of chairs.
She draped one over Mom’s lap, the other around my shoulders.
Rearranging burning logs with the iron poker, Ruth sent showers of sparks up the chimney, firelight glowing on her beautiful face.
Mom was in the rocking chair, silently staring at the flames.
Ruth asked if we’d like anything, perhaps apple juice and cookies, but my stomach didn’t want them.
I got the sense she was waiting for something, but I didn’t know what.
Sitting down next to Ned, she read us stories about a snowman coming to life, and rabbits that knew how to ice skate.
She’d touch her finger to her tongue, turning pages.
In my fantasies, I would stay on her mountain forever, listening to her stories in front of the fire. It was obvious that Mom intended to leave us there, and I felt guilty for wanting the same thing. But that wasn’t meant to be. Ruth had children of her own and couldn’t possibly manage three more.
Had this happened to most people, especially the family of a public figure like Billy Graham, the police would have been summoned. Mom would have been committed to a state institution. Jim, John, and I would have ended up in social services or the orphanage in Swannanoa.